Bathroom Police Head to South Carolina

Imagine wanting to be picked for vice-president and finding yourself faced with a discriminatory hate law and businesses oppose? That’s Nikki Haley’s problem in South Carolina as the legislature heads to pass a “bathroom police” law. A legislator introduced the bill on the pretense of “safety” despite the fact that no problems have existed in any of the places where transgender people can legally use the facilities of their gender identities instead of their birth genitals.

Has no one tried to figure out how to enforce the law? Will every public bathroom be forced to be staffed with a security guard who demands birth certificates and visual inspections of genitals before everyone is allowed to go into the restrooms? Would any violation cause a fine? Or jail time? Or both? Imagine the headlines: bathroom sting catches local resident in sting—perp gets six months for peeing.

Haley has good reason to be reluctant for the bill to pass. Massive corporate fallout has hit North Carolina after their hate legislation that hits almost everyone in the state, and the state is losing money and jobs.

Compare the beliefs of people who want these to laws with their feelings about sensible gun laws. In the latter, conservatives protest restriction of the rights of lawful citizens because potential criminals might use guns to break the laws. They also fight any gun control because laws don’t stop criminals. People with guns kill other people as well as themselves. Transgender people who use bathrooms don’t attack anyone else. In addition, the GOP is also virulently against regulations, yet they want to watch people in bathrooms.

GOP state Sen. Lee Bright’s bill is similar to that in North Carolina by banning all “units of local government” from enacting any “local laws, ordinances, orders, or other regulations that require a place of public accommodation or a private club or other establishment not in fact open to the general public to allow a person to use a multiple occupancy bathroom or changing facility regardless of the person’s biological sex.”

As in North Carolina, the bill could stop federal funding to the state because its policies oppose the current interpretations of federal protections guaranteed to transgender students under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Unlike North Carolina’s new law, however, Bright’s bill doesn’t go into public accommodations, employment, and housing.

Bright has a history of anti-LGBT actions. One of his bills in 2014 would have allowed public employees to refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-gender couples without any punishment. Last year he delivered an anti-LGBT rant during the debate over the state’s flying the Confederate battle flag and said the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling served to “sanctify deviant behavior” and that “the devil is taking control of this land and we’re not stopping him.”

In a satiric column, Andy Borowitz wrote about a possible scene at the North Carolina state capitol in Raleigh where Gov. Pat McCrory swears in 1,000 officers to enforce the new bathroom laws. Borowitz wrote:

“Speaking to the newly graduated bathroom-enforcement cadets, McCrory impressed upon them the gravity of their responsibility. ‘You are the thin blue line charged with protecting the gender sanctity of North Carolina’s bathrooms,’ he said. ‘Be careful out there.'”

After reading Borowitz’s column, Samantha Michaels called North Carolina police departments to see how they plan to enforce the new law. Answers from both Raleigh and Greensboro police departments indicated that they would probably wait for complaints. At the Wilmington Police Department, spokeswoman Linda Rawley said, “So that means people have to go to the bathroom with birth certificates? Yeah, that was curious to me.” Asheville flat out said that lack the police power to check birth certificates. A prime question is whether police can demand birth certificates.

Cathryn Oakley, a senior legislative counsel for the HRC, said that the law, passed in less than ten hours, is “incredibly poorly drafted” and “not motivated by solving a real problem.” Instead, it’s only “a political statement.”

The new law is civil, not criminal, and doesn’t lay out any civil penalties for violations. Police departments don’t know if they can arrest a person who uses the “wrong bathroom.” The Chapel Hill and Carrboro news site Chapelboro pointed out that hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery allow many transgender women to look like biological women even if they don’t have female birth certificates.

Hate bills and laws are leading to danger for anyone who does not fit a strict male or female stereotype. Almost a year ago, Cortney Bogorad, a woman who identifies as a woman, was thrown out a woman’s bathroom because the security guard marched into the bathroom yelling, “This is a woman’s bathroom, if you are a man, come out! Boys aren’t allowed in this restroom.” He pulled her out of a stall as she opened the door and pushed her up against the wall. Bogorad said that he was about three times bigger than she is. She and a friend kept telling him that she is a woman and offered to show him her identification. He refused to look at it and instead shouted inches from her face, “Get out of the women’s restroom!” Once outside the bathroom, she tried to show her ID to someone she identified as a restaurant manager, but he too wouldn’t look at it. The guard finished by picking her up by her shirt and bra, exposing her upper torso to other customers, and threw her out of the restaurant onto the street. Bogorad is now suing the restaurant chain Fishbone’s for physical injury.

The more laws, the more violent the right-wing has become. After the North Carolina and Mississippi laws, conservative are threatening transgender people by beating them into a “bloody pulp,” slitting their throats, etc. Gun laws in some states could allow violent people to legally shoot and kill transgender people if the conservatives felt “fear.”

Haley has said that her state doesn’t need Bright’s law, but what will she do if the legislature disagrees with her?